‘You wait until you see the shed I’ve got now,’ Nerlin said to Mr Hulbert. ‘Gadgets and tools that humans couldn’t even imagine.’
Before he had met Nerlin, Mr Hulbert had no interest in sheds and all the wonderful things they might contain. He thought the most exciting gadget you could get was a ballpoint pen with a nice shiny chrome cap. He had a collection of more than seventeen ballpoint pens, of which he was very proud.
However, since Nerlin had shown him his shed in Acacia Avenue, Mr Hulbert had broadened his horizons. He now had six screwdrivers, an electric staple gun, a cordless drill, a tape measure and a box of assorted screws. He had always planned on finding out what you used these toys for, but never quite got round to it. At the time it had been enough just to go and buy these gadgets and enjoy the thrill of taking them out of their boxes and holding them before putting them in a special cardboard box in his garage. When he had been feeling particularly ambitious, Mr Hulbert had thought about putting a shed up at the end of the garden and had even got as far as getting three shed catalogues.
One of the first things Nerlin had done when he had become King was to put up his own shed at the back of Castle Twilight. It was a beauty, big enough to contain one of every shed in Mr Hulbert’s three catalogues and still have room for a ride-on goat groomer. And because everyone had been so happy to see Nerlin on the throne, once they heard he had built a shed – proving that he was not at all stuck-up like most kings, but actually one of the lads – people turned up every day with wonderful tools and gadgets to give him.
‘I want you to think of this shed as your own,’ said Nerlin to Mr Hulbert. ‘Any time you feel like tinkering with something or want to chill out in one of the saggy old armchairs just come and help yourself.’
Mr Hulbert was overwhelmed at the incredible array of tools and toys. There were things that simply didn’t exist outside of Transylvania Waters – not just PlayStation 6, 7 and 8, but wonderful things like an electric dragon polisher, a machine that could knit waistcoats out of custard, witches’ brew varnish and a turbo wand that could perform three spells at the same time. Nerlin’s shed promised hours and hours of endless fun and discovery, two things there had never been enough of in the normal Hulbert lifestyle.
Satanella and baby Claude Hulbert greeted each other like old friends, which they were. Satanella wagged her tail. Claude tried to wag his, but just wet his nappy in excitement. Ruby and Rosie were over the moon to see Satanella again too.
And of course Morbid and Silent began mooning and swooning over Ffiona again and arguing which one of them would marry her when they were old enough.
In no time at all, it was as if the old friends had never been apart. The Hulberts thought they would stay in Transylvania Waters for two weeks’ holiday, but the two weeks became three. The three weeks became four and every time Mr or Mrs Hulbert thought they should say something about going home, their hearts got the better of their brains and they said nothing.
Now the Floods were back where they belonged in the land of witches and wizards it was decided that Betty should go to school with her brothers and sisters at Quicklime College in Patagonia. Of course, there were other schools in Transylvania Waters. After all, not everyone wanted to send their children to a wizard school. Mr and Mrs Hulbert were not at all sure about Ffiona going to Quicklime’s with Betty – and Quicklime’s was definitely extremely uncertain about Ffiona, a human, coming to their school.
‘But you brought the Hulberts here because they are your friends and you missed them,’ said Betty.
‘True,’ said Mordonna.
‘Well, Ffiona is my friend so I want her to come to school with me every day.’
They had to call an Extraordinary Special Meeting at the school. Ffiona Hulbert would be the first human student ever and even if her best friend Betty Flood was a princess, it was still a big and potentially dangerous decision to let her in. Of course, King Nerlin of Transylvania Waters donating a Werefrog Tank to the science lab helped, and the fact that Winchflat was the cleverest student the school had ever had was also good, but it was Betty’s arguments at the meeting that finally won everyone over.
‘I’m sure you will all agree that humans are probably the weirdest life form on this planet,’ she said.
Everyone did agree.
‘And very often, we just can’t believe how stupid and evil they can be, can we?’
They couldn’t.
‘If fact, I’m sure everyone here has, at least once, come across or heard of something humans have done that was so ridiculous they simply could not believe it at all?’
They had.
‘Well, just think how wonderfully useful it would be to have a human here among us who could help us sort out the myth from the reality.’
Everyone thought.
Then they thought some more and agreed that Betty was right.
So Ffiona Hulbert went to Quicklime College not just as a student, but also as a teacher. Once a week she gave a class where she tried to explain why humans did some of the things they do that quite often not only made no sense at all, but actually threatened their very existence.
Some days even baby Claude Hulbert went to school, where he learned potty training and how to stay upright and how frogs are your friends, not your dinner.
Mrs Hulbert started teaching Pilates because no one in Transylvania Waters had ever heard of it before. Most people thought it was a diet where you ate a lot of pies and drank a lot of lattés. Wizards and witches were not into healthy exercise. They realised that exercise was very, very, very, very boring, even if you wear an iPod. If a witch thought she was getting a bit overweight she just did a Slimming Spell, and wizards all had extremely toned muscles because they did the Micro-Flexing-While-I-Am-Asleep-Keep-Fit-Routine. But Pilates wasn’t like proper exercise and became very fashionable, especially when Mordonna started doing it.
Mr Hulbert had all the skills that Nerlin didn’t have and didn’t want, like adding things up and then multiplying them by ten and writing them down in books.
‘They’re called accounts,’ Mr Hulbert, ‘and they’re actually quite exciting.’
‘In that case, on no account would I want to take any of them away from you,’ said Nerlin.
So it was that Mr Hulbert became the Chancellor of Transylvania Waters. Nerlin wondered if people would object to a human having the job, but since every single person fell asleep whenever they tried to add more than three numbers together, they were all only too happy for Mr Hulbert to have the job. And, of course, being the Chancellor, which is like the top accountant, of an entire country certainly beat being the accountant in a company that made hinges for toilet seats, which is what Mr Hulbert had been doing before.
‘I suppose we’d better go back to Acacia Avenue and sell the house and quit my job and all that sort of stuff,’ said Mr Hulbert.
‘No problem,’ said Nerlin. ‘All sorted. You got a big redundancy payout from the International Toilet Seat Hinge Company because by an amazing coincidence the owner wanted to give your job to his son.’
‘I didn’t know the boss even had a son,’ said Mr Hulbert.
‘He didn’t,’ said Nerlin, ‘but hey, a little magic here and there can work wonders.’
The Hulberts’ house was bought by the sister of the greenies over the road, who paid way over what it was worth so they could live near each other and recycle their rubbish by giving it to each other.
‘Good result all round,’ said Mordonna as the two families sat on the verandah of the tallest tower in Castle Twilight drinking warm blood slurpies.
As far as the eye could see, little lights twinkled as the entire population of Transylvania Waters sat on their verandahs and drank warm blood slurpies too.
Now that Merlin had cleared most of the clouds away, the moon covered their magical land like a steel-cold glow that sent a deeply comforting icy chill through everyone’s heart.
‘You know,’ said Mordonna, ‘life does not
get any better than this.’
And she was right.62
There is no postscript, though there could be a script in the post.
Three days later Mildred Flambard-Flood gave birth to a lovely bouncing baby boy, Prince Corduroi.
Winchflat and Maldegard Ankle got married. The bride wore white. The groom wore gaffer tape and red herrings. Three hundred and three days later Maldegard gave birth to a lovely bouncing baby girl, Princess Transistor.
At some point in the future, if Prince Corduroi and Princess Transistor can manage to co-ordinate their bouncing so they can be in the same place at the same time, they may well meet and fall in love, though probably not.
FOOTNOTES
1 Just read the earlier books, for goodness sake.
2 Shivers that scare the willies out of humans.
3 Actually, everyone on Australian Idol gets called a legend, but then you don’t have to end up fifteenth to be a loser. Everyone is.
4 This is because, to wizards and witches, Dead Sewer Slugs and Gravy is the same as chocolate is to humans. If they think about it, smell it or see it, they just have to eat some right away.
5 Scraping mud off the bottom of things was an old Flautists of Glackenstein tradition. They had been doing it since 1233 and their Castle – Castle Glackenstein – had dozens of rooms of mud samples that today form the basis of the internationally renowned Courtauld Collection Of Mud Scraped Off The Bottom Of Things. The collection is still growing to this day, at such an alarming rate that many of the jars have exploded.
6 See the back of this book for a prospectus.
7 Iron Pyrite – look it up on Google.
8 Except Auntie Mould, who spent the night in the same cardboard box she had slept in for the past very long time.
9 Actually, Betty was not totally out of the Countess’s reach as some little drops of spit landed in her hair.
10 One of the under-cooks had once spent a week in hospital after the Countess had forced several not-small-enough brussels sprouts up her nose, and almost everyone had nasty bruises from being walloped with a frying pan.
11 Not many people realise this, but if a spell is used a lot it can actually get worn out.
12 This is in here because it has now become illegal in Australia to write or speak for more than five minutes without calling someone a Legend. This is because no one knows the proper meaning of the word and there are lots of stupid people about. Of course, twenty-five per cent of these stupid people are also called Legends. By the year 2020 anyone who can stand up unaided for more than one minute will qualify as a Legend.
13 We will actually find out just who is behind the Cabbage Curse a bit later on.
14 Not surprising as George had never felt really, truly happy EVER.
15 Achilles Heels are not super-cool running shoes. Just check it out on Google.
16 See The Floods 5: Prime Suspect and The Floods 6: The Great Outdoors.
17 When I was in Cambodia this year I ate some tarantula spider and it tasted EXACTLY the same as the Hearse Whisperer – kind of bacon-flavoured plastic.
18 Originally called the Miss Transylvania Waters Beauty Pageant, the name had been changed after protests from several contestants who were Misters. Then there were protests from entrants who were neither Miss nor Mister, and more complaints from people who were none of the above. In the end the word ‘Miss’ was changed to ‘Being’ as it was felt that covered everyone. There are currently complaints from entities who claim to be ‘Non-Beings’ and that the title discriminates against things that don’t exist. So far no one has actually thought of not having any word at the beginning, as that would be much too easy.
19 Actually, anyone coming to Transylvania Waters has to cross the highest mountains anyway.
20 We all know that blind people have an extra well-developed sense of touch, but I would like you to imagine what it would feel like to run your hands over someone who had just won a gold medal for the size and leakiness of their giant mega-zits. That’s why if you have had your eyes poked out by a secret agent, it is probably a good idea to keep away from Transylvania Waters.
21 Several contestants in the past have been disqualified by the Tasting Judges for adding cement or grit to their oozings.
22 Not something you want to do if you live down a sewer as Nerlin had been.
23 As long as you only lived for three more years.
24 This was not very complicated as there was usually only one fortune – you will get eaten.
25 For all timid parents, teachers and booksellers, this is NOT rude because Maldegard with no clothes on is about as exciting and appealing as a very wrinkly tree trunk. Also, it was very dark in Maldegard’s room, much too dark to see any naughty bits. Some people have asked why on earth would she want everyone to take off their clothes and if she looked so scary why she didn’t cover herself up completely. It’s because fortune-telling is about uncovering things and Maldegard Ankle just uncovered a bit more than all the other fortune tellers.
26 New word – similar to ‘forefathers’, but not so sexist.
27 See various Floods novels and the Floods picture book, The Floods Family Files, where you will see a picture of Winchflat’s creation – the strange yet mysteriously delightful Igorina.
28 Not surprising really with Princess Mordonna for a mother and Merlin’s descendant Nerlin, the rightful King of Transylvania Waters, for a father. All the Floods children were princes or princesses. Merlinmary, of course, was both.
29 ‘Good thing too,’ said the publisher, parents, teachers and booksellers. ‘Though we are still not happy about the nudity even if they are both unconscious.’
30 When I was about 25 years old, I lived in Mallorca for a while and became friends with Robert Graves (the VERY famous English Poet) and his family. We used to play Animal Scrabble, which had been invented by Robert’s wife Beryl. Any animal got you a double score. A few years later I was living in the Outer Hebrides, where we used to play Meat Scrabble.
31 Because they were all the sort of girls who never go ANYWHERE without a mirror.
32 History is full of great romantic stories like this. A humble boy, usually the son of a wood-chopper, sees a princess riding by and falls in love with her. Of course, she is quite unaware that he even exists. Meanwhile, a string of nerdy or arrogant or stupid – usually all three – fabulously wealthy princes come from far-off kingdoms and attempt to win the princess’s hand and heart. The princess always rejects the princes and eventually meets the wood-chopper’s son. They fall in love in spite of the king’s objections, marry and live happily ever after, a bit like Mordonna and Nerlin did. Sometimes it even turns out that the wood-chopper’s son is not really his son, but an abandoned baby the wood-chopper found in the forest who actually turns out to be a totally awesome genuine prince with staggering amounts of charm, good looks, CDs, PlayStations and money. The kitchen boy and Betty, of course, knew all about these stories.
33 Like paperclips but for bits of skin instead of paper.
34 Yes they do. My cousin Crawford looks exactly like one of those short fat gnomes in a red waistcoat holding a fishing rod. In fact he may well have been the model for the very first one they made. I also have a second-cousin Marie who looks like a very comfortable armchair.
35 NOT ‘knitting for’ so much as ‘knitting with’. There were no sheep in Transylvania Waters.
36 It also burnt her stubborn moustache, which made her look just as ugly as before but less hairy.
37 Not even his parents, who had tried to sell him on eBay when every single charity shop in Bavaria-Battenberg had refused to take him.
38 This has led to a lot of cockroaches having conversations with themselves in mirrors, and one species of cockroach that has become extinct because it kept marrying its own reflection.
39 Which, due to its very small size, should be, but isn’t, an abbreviation for Not Much Rockatall and, even though it really does exist over 460 kilometres off the coast of S
cotland, it is so small and useless it isn’t even on Google Earth!
40 The most prized gift was a pair of underpants actually woven out of pressed flowers.
41 Millions of humans are born with this spell.
42 This ignores the fact that in Transylvania Waters no one ever has coffee mornings due to the fact there is no coffee in the country. Nor is there any tea. In fact all there is to drink is green cloudy water. Green Cloudy Water Mornings never caught on.
43 If they had actually been in a boat, life would have been a lot better. Without the grease worms that lived in the drains everyone’s socks would have lasted a lot longer if they had been in a boat.
44 Strangely, being much too old is exactly what is required to be the King and Queen in lots of countries.
45 Everyone who has NOT read any of the earlier books, even though they are seriously pathetic (the non-readers, that is, not the books, which are totally brilliant) will also know this now.
46 Just in case you are thinking, ‘Aha, chickens, so they must have had eggs in Transylvania Waters as well as cabbage!’ you are wrong. The Cabbage Curse was so powerful that the chickens all laid brussels sprouts.
47 There was no need for a Post Office in Transylvania Waters because every family had at least one person who could do telepathy and send messages to their friends by thought waves. A Post Office would still have been useful as it is very difficult to send parcels by thought waves. People have tried. There were the famous telekinesis experiments of 1935 where they tried to transport a fruit cake from one end of the country to the other just by using thought waves. The experiment never quite worked properly. The sender would concentrate and the fruit cake would vanish OK, but when it materialised at its destination it was not so much a fruit cake any more as bucket of wet fish. This coincided with a mysterious storm in Belgium where it rained huge amounts of fruit cake.
48 The scientists on this planet are hoping to invent the paper bag once they work out how to make paper. This will not be easy as the entire surface of the planet in under two metres of water.
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